A health care facility will typically have hundreds of standard procedures, protocols, rules, or guidelines dealing with the treatment and care provided to a patient. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies will also typically prescribe a regimen of care for a patient who uses their products. In addition, state and federal regulatory commissions, insurance companies, and even medical organizations will also prescribe additional standards for the care of patients.
With all these procedures, protocols, rules, or guidelines, it is quite difficult for a health care practitioner to keep up with or even remember the countless procedures which should be followed. Typically, a health care practitioner will treat a number of patients each day, and in the course of treating that patient, a number of different procedures or protocols may need to be applied. As a result, some procedures, protocols, or guidelines may be overlooked or simply forgotten, and the patient may not receive the optimum level of care.
A health care facility will often use patient charts to track the care provided to each patient. Each patient chart will typically include annotations for all treatments and medications for a particular patient. The health care practitioner is expected to read the chart, and from that information, know the exact regiment of care that should be provided, and to execute the regiment in a timely fashion. However, the charts do not remind the health care practitioner that a proper procedure was followed, nor will it suggest a regiment of treatment, nor will it remind the health care practitioner that a particular action is due. As such, the current method of tracking and monitoring patient care does not provide adequate assurances that a patient is being treated according to a given health care organization's guidelines.
The health care practitioner is also faced with numerous situations wherein they are entrusted with the timely application of medical care. For example, a patient may receive an abnormally high level of white blood cells seeming to indicate a possible infection. The guidelines for treating the infection may call for the periodic application of an antibiotic medication and continued monitoring of the white blood cell level. Failure of a health care practitioner to give the appropriate medication at the required interval of time may lengthen the period of illness or even make the treatment less effective. A failure to monitor the white blood cell level may result in the overprescribing or underprescribing the appropriate amount of medication. Consequently, the timely application of medical care is a vital concern to a health care facility.
However, the number of patients being treated, the wide variety of procedures and protocols to follow, and time constraints make it difficult for a health care practitioner to remember which specific therapeutic intervention or diagnostic test is indicated for a specific decision state or intervention. As a result, treatments and diagnostic tests may be missed simply because the health care practitioner had forgotten that it was indicated.
What is needed is a method of tracking and monitoring the care given a patient to ensure that the patient is being provided the optimum level of care. Furthermore, there is also a need for a method and a system for reminding the health care practitioner when a prescribed action has been overlooked or needs to be performed.